


please allow me to be your anti-depressant

by bookishandbossy



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Getting Together, Karen POV, Romance, Some angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 16:37:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4443713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The morning after they moved into the new office, Matt brought her hot coffee and scones. </p>
<p>Or, how to tell a girl she's beautiful when you can't even see her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	please allow me to be your anti-depressant

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Anti-D by the Wombats.
> 
> If I have to fill the fic tag for this ship all by myself, I will do it.

The morning after they moved into the new office, Matt brought her hot coffee and scones. “Your voice sounded tired,” he said when she thanked him. “I didn't get the coffee wrong, did I?”

“No, it's...it's perfect,” she replied, taking another sip. It was strong and sweet, the perfect thing for the purple circles under her eyes and the tiredness that'd worked its way into her bones. She'd barely been able to sleep since it happened, tossing and turning all night, afraid that every creak and little noise was someone coming for her, reliving the moment when she'd pulled the trigger every time she closed her eyes. It didn't help that her apartment still had a bloodstain spreading across the floor, one that was visible no matter how many rugs she piled over it. If she had the money or the time, Karen would find a new apartment and start all over again. She'd paint the walls bright colors and cover every last inch of cold floor with soft rugs and grow basil in pots on her fire escape and turn each room into someplace where she could feel safe. She'd break herself down into each of the things that had led her that cold room and to the colder feeling of a gun in her hand and then wipe them all out. At three in the morning, pacing her floor, she even thought that maybe she'd move away completely, change her name and her past and forget that she'd ever had blood on her hands. But then she remembered the office and Matt and Foggy and all the things that she'd done for good, the men she'd helped topple, the shadows she'd dragged into the light, and she knew that she could never leave.

“Eat the scones too, before Foggy finds out that I got them all for you,” he added and looked unaccountably pleased with himself when she laughed.

“I am,” she protested around a bite of scone. They really were delicious, apple and cardamon, and she made a mental note to ask Matt just where he'd gotten them. Tangible things, that was it, little bits of warmth (the cup in her hands, the flash of his smile) to keep the nightmares away for the day.

“I even had to fight my way through the crowd to get to the last ones. I have a bruise right here to show for it,” he said and tapped his cheekbone. They both knew that his bruise hadn't come from that.

“You know, if you're planning to bribe me with scones to make me forget all about my paltry salary, it's not going to work,” Karen told him. “I would require donuts at the very least.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Miss Page. Maybe next time, we should let you negotiate the rent for the office.”

“I heard that!” Foggy shouted from his office. “And I would just like both of you to know that I feel severely betrayed! _Betrayed_!” Karen and Matt were too busy collapsing into fits of laughter to shout anything back. 

The next morning, he brought her another cup of coffee and a waxed paper bag full of old-fashioned cream donuts: chocolate and salted caramel and coffee and green tea and banana and every last flavor he could find. The next day it was a streusel-topped muffin, thick with berries. The day after that, an elaborately braided brioche construction, topped with fruit and sugar and almost too pretty to eat, appeared on her desk. And he just kept on bringing her food. Buttery croissants that left pastry flakes all over her desk. A tiny tower of sweet and savory danishes that she found perched on top of her files when she came in. Something called an amelie amman that came apart in layers of caramelized croissant dough with hints of pistachio and rose. And every morning, coffee for her to wrap her hands around, hot and strong and sweet (but not quite as sweet, she admitted in her weaker moments, as the sight of him).

“This is the only thing keeping me awake right now,” she told him one morning as she happily bit into a cinnamon roll. “Sugar and caffeine.”

“You haven't been sleeping much.” He said it like it wasn't a question.

“I...” _I see the face of the man I killed every night?_ “I think I might need a new apartment. After what happened, ” Karen decided on the simple, the solvable, the things that someone could break down into a series of easy steps, even if she couldn't be that someone and even if it seemed like so few things were that easy.

“So do you want to go apartment hunting?” Matt offered and gestured toward the corner of the office where Foggy was trying to look like he wasn't eavesdropping and failing spectacularly. “Foggy knows a lot about countertops, though I have no idea why.”

“Could have been a butcher!” Foggy said cheerfully. “We'll even negotiate the terms of your lease for you, since we're still suspiciously lacking in clients. Though Marci did mention some disillusioned Lehman and Zak clients looking for a new firm...”

“Are they white collar criminals?” Matt sighed.

“Technically, none of them have been convicted of anything.” That started off round three of the Great Nelson-Murdock debate of June 2015 and Karen shut her eyes and let the strangely comforting sound of their bickering wash over her. This...this was familiar, this was safe, this was something she could know by heart, this was almost (not quite, not yet) home.

They went apartment hunting the next weekend, thick sheaf of real estate listings in one hand and coffee in the other. Matt had a weakness for cinnamon, she discovered, and ordered chocolatey mochas when he thought no one was looking. He guided them through the city effortlessly, zigzagging from block to block, dodging around tourists on crowded streets, and darting down alleyways to cut from street to street, and Karen almost teased him about spending a lot of time in dark alleys until she remembered the suspicions that she kept pushed to the back of her mind and filed the thought away with them. 

They found the right apartment three weekends later, after Foggy had inspected every last inch of countertop, Marci had measured out the closet space and deemed it satisfactory, Matt had checked all the exits and the locks on the door, and Karen had stood in the middle of the bedroom and seen how well she could breathe. When she shut her eyes, she didn't see any nightmares and she signed the lease without saying another word.

She bought packs of furniture with strange Swedish names from IKEA and put all of them together herself, shooting death glares at the cheerful stick figures in the instruction manuals. She dragged over boxes of clothes and ended up giving half of them away anyway. (She'd burned the clothes she'd worn that night a long time ago.) She hung coppery pots and pans in her kitchen and alphabetized her rows of fat paperback novels and bought five small clay pots of herbs. The first one died, but the rest didn't. And finally, when she was almost moved in, Matt called and told her she was allowed to paint the walls.

“Really? Who did you have to sell your soul to?” she asked, balancing the phone between her neck and shoulder and stirring a bowl of buttercream frosting with one hand. If Matt could bring her a seemingly limitless number of pastries, she could make him cupcakes.

“I just offered your landlord some free legal advice,” he said easily. “Mostly along the lines of how wise it would be to give you everything you wanted.”

“So what color do you think they should be? If you got me colorful walls, you should get to choose.”

“You're asking a blind man to paint your walls?” He laughed, low and slightly puzzled. “I, ah...I do remember some color from before the accident but I...paint it the color of your voice, Karen. That's the best I can think of.”

Matt came over to help her paint, after she'd coaxed and teased him into it, and dragged his paintbrush in great streaks across the wall as he let Karen boss him around for the day. She'd picked a bright sky blue in the end, a color that she hoped her voice sounded like on her best days, and she painted in wide arcs and watched her walls come alive, and when Matt asked her to describe what the color looked like, she said that it was like hope.

He promised to cook her dinner while the paint was drying in her apartment and while he was carefully inspecting an eggplant, she examined his carefully arranged row of records. “They really do sound different,” he explained later, when she asked about his collection. “I put them on and just sit here and listen and it's like I'm being swept under by the music. Like I can't hear anything else.”

She almost asked him what he didn't want to hear, but she'd already noticed the way that Matt seemed to be able to know when she was coming into the office before she'd even entered the building and so instead she asked him to play one for her. In the dark, so she'd have a chance of hearing it the same way he did.

Matt played her the second side of the Beatles' Revolver and when all the lights were off, she slid her hand over so that the side of hers brushed against his, their pinkies barely touching. Karen drew in a deep breath, heard him breathe along with her, and offered up her confession. “I think I may have done something I shouldn't have.”

“I think that I might have too.” And in the dark, his hand closed over hers.

Three weeks later, she made dinner for him as a thank you and when he had to leave just before ten and she teased him about having a hot date, his face twisted itself into a strange shape and he went completely still. “I don't really date anymore,” he said quietly. “I'm not sure if I ever will again.”

“Why not?” The wine they'd had with dinner had flushed her cheeks and made her brave, and so she took a step forwards towards him, hands clenched at her side so they wouldn't reach out and touch him.

“I hurt people or they hurt me or, worst of all, people get hurt just from being around me. The heart is so damn dangerous and no matter what I want, I can't forget that.”

“Everyone gets hurt sometimes: you know, whenever you start something new, that there's that chance. But you can't let that stop you.” She stepped forward just enough to rest a hand over his and wind their fingers together. “If you want something enough, you're okay with being hurt. And if...if she does get hurt, you can help put her back together.”

“You really think I could do something like that?”

“I think you already have,” she breathed. It wasn't careful, wasn't subtle, wasn't even thought out before she said it. And maybe Karen Page should have considered every last consequence, every last little disaster that they could have created behind them, every last secret they were keeping from each other, but she had always gone after every last thing she wanted without thinking twice and in that moment, so close that she could feel the heat radiating off his skin, she wanted Matt Murdock more than she'd ever wanted anything before in her life.

The first time that she kissed him, it was a question, her lips brushing softly against his and her hands skimming over the muscles of his back. The first time that he kissed her, it was an answer, his mouth coming down hard on hers and his hands pulling her closer until she was pressed against the wall of her apartment and he was pressed against her and they were nothing but breath and lips and hands and the question and the answer were the exact same thing and it was yes. Always yes.


End file.
